Tales from the Big House: Normanby Hall: 400 Years of Its History and People

By Stephen Wade

Tales from the Big House: Normanby Hall tells the story of a place known perhaps today mainly as the home where Samantha Cameron grew up, but historically it has been the seat of the Sheffield family, whose most famous member was arguably the Duke of Buckingham in the seventeenth century. As with most country houses, the Hall was used as a military hospital in the Great War, and in the Second World War there were military personnel based there again. It stands just a few miles from the great steelworks on the Brigg Road, which have always defined Scunthorpe, so it played its part in the history of steel-making also.The book includes biographies of the famous but also tells of the lives of the ordinary people who kept the house and the estate going, from the gamekeepers to the gardeners, and the cooks to the stable hands. All this is set against the social background through the centuries of its existence, up to the sale of the Hall to Scunthorpe Borough Council in 1964. The lives familiar to us today from Downton Abbey and similar family sagas are at the heart of Stephen Wades history. But along the way, the reader will meet such characters as Sir Berkeley Sheffield, model railway enthusiast, Walter Brierley, architect, Thomas Sumpter, the schoolmaster, John Fletcher, machine-maker, and perhaps most charismatically of all, Lady Arthur Grosvenor, an expert on gypsy caravans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781473893412

Stephen Wade

Stephen Wade is a biographer and social historian, usually associated with crime and law, but here he turns his attention to a place he has known for forty years, as he has lived and worked in Scunthorpe all that time. His most recent books have been "Going to Extremes", "The Justice Women" and three volumes in the "Your Town in the Great War" series (all Pen & Sword), and :No More Soldiering" (Amberley).

Book preview

Introduction

You think that the contours of the place are familiar: the noble pile as seen on a thousand television programmes; the backdrop for the world of Brideshead Revisited and Gosford Park; you think that, for one moment as you look at the frieze on the wall and the peacocks calling from the yard, this is some unreal dream about a time when life seemed simpler, when everyone knew their place and every day was circumscribed and repeated. Ghosts are obligatory: there is surely a Grey Lady walking the corridors? You expect to hear the tinkling of champagne glasses and desultory talk of hunts and shoots; there is a sense that these walls have retained the voices, the emotions and the aspirations of those stylish and wealthy people of past times.

But no, a contemporary voice snaps you out of the reverie. Someone asks for money or for a season payment card. You are entering that very English creation, the country house as a business enterprise, as a quintessential aristocratic experience. Yet in spite of the cold light of reason as a closer and more sober inspection follows, that nagging, insistent feeling that history is here preserved more strongly than in any other dwelling tends to persist. The overall impression is that in places such as this, power was part of the lifestyle, and it was combined with panache.

That was the sensation I experienced the first time I visited Normanby Hall in North Lincolnshire after its new life in the hands of the local council. Even the word ‘council’ seemed wrong. Surely, I reflected, there was a squire inside, enjoying a G&T, perusing Country Life magazine? There must be a man in a smart outfit to polish the silver?

No, there was none of this. In fact, the absence of all this, and the sense that the reverie was ended, made me more determined than ever to tell the story of the Hall and to pluck from history the ‘people stories’ that are not usually found in the glossy guidebooks. The last thing I wanted to write was such a publication; my aim was a social history, with biographies interwoven. The work for that was a delight, full of discoveries, and never was the feeling that history is written by the powerful more persistent; therefore, all the more determined was my aim of including ordinary folk. But at the same time, the various family members of the Sheffield dynasty have offered fascinating stories too.

Recounting the history of a country house is inevitably to gather a bundle of tales, all concerned with the house’s place and influence. Every such home across the acres of England has been a hub of employment, culture and economic importance, and Normanby is no exception. At first I envisaged the story of a family, but I ended with an account of, metaphorically, a spider in the centre of a constantly spun web. How could anyone have lived in the North Lincolnshire villages of Normanby, Winterton, Flixborough or the places that were to form Scunthorpe, through the centuries, and not be influenced by the remarkable Sheffield family? They must have featured in the breakfast talk of thousands of workers and their families, and their doings were surely reported on in local newspapers every week.

Consequently, I came to realize that I was dealing with an example of a solid, inescapable presence in the history of our land. One could almost use the word ‘iconic’ because the very mention of the phrase ‘country house’ has a resonance in the mind, as well as presenting an image.

As the visitor walks through the gates of Normanby Hall today, it takes an effort of historical imagination to see what the view would have been around 1830, when the Hall was new and had only the few essential outbuildings that were needed at that time. Today, that view from the little road to Normanby village includes a car park and kiosk, a gift shop, a fenced road out and a clutter of smaller structures, down to the information hut. If one removes all the later spread of heritage support installation, what is left is very much what the Regency place would have been, with Hall and stables dominating. Sir Robert Sheffield at that time would have looked out from his library to the left of the entrance hall to see grass and trees, and from his dining room on the other side he would have seen the parkland and beyond that, the territory of the hunter and stalker, nudging next to farming land.

It is not so hard today to imagine that Regency scene. Fortunately we have plenty of pictures and descriptions to help. Yet there is much more to a ‘big house’ than the mere verbal descriptions. Normanby, like all its kindred homes across England’s verdant land, is a visible image of a way of life that has been part of the scene since the first lords of the manors after 1066, when William the Conqueror allotted land to his friends and fighters. The great Domesday Book, prepared from 1066 to 1086, is the first concept of that nation parcelled out to the victors, the beginnings of the Norman and Saxon oppositions that would eventually settle into a full and governed state, with a parliament and a set of laws. Survival is about stability, and in the case of English history, the seats of local power and status gradually evened out to become the centres of administration with the responsibility that went with it. The lords often became justices and Lords Lieutenants of shires or sheriffs, and so the country house became important for many, layered reasons.

When we walk to those gates today at Normanby, the end of that great chain of history is still there to see, albeit without its resident lords and servants. In past times, publications noted the problems inherent in writing about the Hall. In Country Life, for instance, in a feature from 1911, the author comments, ‘In the Case of Normanby Park … the difficulty of tracing the story is the greater, because the records in possession of the Sheffield family are remarkably scant.’ This is not really the case for the modern period, but the earlier, pre-Tudor people and events are rather sketchy.

Received wisdom tells us that we generally fail to truly understand that which is on our doorstep; visitors to tourist locations are often amazed at the lack of knowledge exhibited by locals about the history and narratives concerning the place in question. I feel this to be true in my own case with regard to Normanby Hall, which sits in the rural heart of North Lincolnshire just a few miles from the steel town of Scunthorpe, where I have lived for forty years. I am a Yorkshireman, and by now I should be a Lincolnshire ‘Yellowbelly’, but that has never been the case. Strangely, after all these years of life just a few miles from the blast furnaces and rolling mills, part of me still feels like a visitor.

That strange and very English aspect of place and belonging is strikingly interesting with regard to our attitudes to country houses. We pay money to visit them and we stroll around the luscious libraries, dining rooms and halls with a sense of awe. This opulence and impressively beautiful feast for our eyes is something that is close to our homes, part of the scene, and yet oddly alien. The life of the seated family in their grand house is still almost mythically English; the success of Downton Abbey on television proves this. The immense popularity of this drama, featuring the lives of Lord Grantham and his family and their servants, has shown conclusively that our fascination with the aristocracy and their homes knows no bounds.

It is not simply the buildings and rooms that fascinate either: the objets d’art, paintings, furniture and lines of leather-bound volumes also intrigue us. The material culture of the rich and famous also draws us in. When Normanby Hall became leased to Scunthorpe Borough Council in 1964, a sale of house contents was needed, and entries from that catalogue tell us immediately what kinds of attractions lay within these great and stately places: ‘A beautiful garniture of three Dresden vases as baskets of open latticework tinted in puce and turquoise and painted with naturalistic banquets’ or ‘An elegant William IV naval dress sword … a Turkish sword …’ The catalogue listed such items as fenders, chandeliers, chests, vases, cupboards, wardrobes, cabinets, elbow chairs and window frames.

As Scunthorpe generally was primarily interested in the new stand for the football ground at the Old Show Ground or the fact that a garage man in Manley Street was cutting two pence off petrol, life in the early 1960s was dour and workmanlike for most. But 6 miles up the road, by Normanby village, there was a house and a park that symbolized another kind of Englishness: something rooted in traditional rural life. When it closed as a true family home in 1964, it was a very emotional occasion. What it represented was elegance, class and luxury, but also something else: its family story – its tales concerning people as well as buildings. That family story has its oddness and eccentricity. Those features have always been a part of high-class biography, as in the case of Sir William Ponsonby Barker, who used a female servant in place of a hot water bottle at his home at Cilcooley Abbey. But the family stories also exemplified the English family in general, somehow strangely exaggerated and more visible.

What the rich families did with their time also has its fascination. Roger Lewis, reviewing a new book on country homes, offers some figures that illustrate what many aristocrats did to fill the leisure hours: ‘During the day the men went shooting. In the 1934–35 season, the Duke of Portland killed 5,148 pheasants and 3,268 brace of partridge at Welbeck Abbey. He was reticent compared with George V, however, who, with his group, slaughtered 3,937 pheasants … near Beaconsfield in a single day in 1913.’

Yet for much of the time, the owners and estate managers did work very hard and worried a great deal, having the huge responsibility of keeping the business going, for that was what the stately homes were, and are: businesses as well as leisure attractions. The Sheffield family in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, led by first Sir Robert and then by Sir Berkeley, have ample evidence in their records and archives proving that preserving such an estate is a constant worry. The life of Sir Robert illustrates this in every way, as the chapter on him shows. He produced an immense amount of written material, all concerned with practical estate management and farming topics. Sir Berkeley, his son, found time to be a Member of Parliament and to work for a time as a diplomat with Lord Milner.

Normanby Hall has been a perfect example of that phenomenon, the country home and estate that digs itself deeply into the locality and earns respect and affection. The Hall itself has changed and been adapted over the years, just as its families have had to change and adapt. But at the very heart of the enterprise there has always been the knowledge in the environs that it is a visible proof of something quintessentially English. It has reached out into fetes, processions, rural shows, miniature railways and even into hospital work, but here it has always stood, grand and immovable. Perhaps the closest instance we have in which the Hall was almost destroyed is during the Second World War when an unexploded bomb landed very close and was entrenched in the garden. But somehow it seems typical of the place that it survived and the bomb lay silently threatening, but inert.

Evidence of the Sheffield family’s impact on the area around Burton, Normanby and Scunthorpe is not hard to find. The local press has chronicled their activities, and right up to its most recent newsworthy phase when Samantha Cameron (Samantha Sheffield at birth) married David Cameron, there has always been something of interest going on at ‘the Hall’. If we take a distant view and look at Normanby from the air or from a train, then the image is a strikingly arresting one. This is because from the edge of the Park where eventing and dog walking go on regularly, there is a clear view of the steelworks that lies between Appleby and Scawby. Until the 1980s, there was also the massive plant of Normanby Park steelworks, though that has gone and has been replaced by a scattering of small companies strung out along the road between Scunthorpe and Burton.

As with all social history, a focus on one community brings the inevitable dual narrative of a micro and a macro history. The micro history tells the story of the Hall and the Park and how these played an important role in the development of the immediate rural area; it was a case of tenant farmers and close liaison between Hall and the dependent families, of course, and there is no denying that the knowledge behind the profit motive of the landowner is clearly in evidence in the archives; there was no room for any soft, indulgent attitudes when survival was the aim. In the macro history the story of the Hall reaches into world affairs at times, and certainly into the broader economic history of the countryside. Through the nineteenth century, there were rhythmic movements of boom and depression in agriculture and in keeping animals, and there were also periods when crime came to the fore, as with the always present threat of poaching on the large estates, and Normanby was no exception. The criminal element figures in the account of Sir Robert Sheffield in particular, as there were killings on his property as keepers and poachers clashed.

If one selects the real spine of the Sheffield family story since about 1800, it lies in the lives of the heads of the family at a time when the super rich were multiplying. The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century meant that the nouveaux riches, the wealthy men who had made their fortunes through business enterprise, were rubbing shoulders with the likes of the Sheffields, Portlands and Lowthers. From the Regency years through to the death of Queen Victoria, there was a certain sense of competition and of ‘keeping up’ with the need to have visible signs of status and wealth, and Normanby Hall did, to a limited extent, suffer from the results of that, but there is no doubt that at the point when it became pretty much what it is to the visitor today, it was developed in line with the current classical trends, as the great architect Robert Smirke set about making it notably impressive. Columns and porticos were the order of the day, and as Mordaunt Crook, architectural historian, has explained, classical structure and embellishment was hard to resist: ‘The lure of classicism never had much to do with comfort or convenience. Ever since Alexander Pope, the Palladian mansion had been a byword for haughty discomfort: Is this a dinner? This a genial room? / No, ’tis a temple and a hecatomb.’ It would have been understandable if Sir Robert Sheffield had gone along with such trends, but he and Smirke knew that classical design still had to be an image with a real, genuine domestic place behind the frontages. Mordaunt Crook sums up the appeal of Smirke: ‘His austere neo-Classicism